Guidewire

Professional culture: friendly, supportive, and striving for rationality. A good amount of long-time employees are still with the company, helping the retention of knowledge.

The management in product development has been deteriorating in the last several years. A few years ago, a full product-dev re-org was followed by a second reboot to fix the mistakes of the first. After the re-org, engineers ended up less involved in important decisions.

Appreciation of successful project delivery, meaning respect, awards, or occasional promotion to project participants, also subsided. The social (party) budget of teams increased substantially, but that cannot mask the real issues.

Stick more closely to the company values and stand your ground against Wall Street's pressure to reduce the company to just another public hi-tech firm.